Perfect!
So I decided to combine two of some of his most favourite things - Star Wars and Coffee..... and probably not in that order now that we have 3 little kids to run after!
A Darth Vader Coffee Cup Cozy.
The Darth Vader is probably too big for the side of the smaller regular sized coffee cups I had at home - luckily he enjoys the larger take away coffees!
Also as I had made the Coffee Cozy out of Acrylic, I tied a bit of actual wool inside the back so there is actually some wool included. *Superstitious*
The Darth Vader was created just by counting stitches across using this graph - Darth Vader Chart.
The style of the Coffee Cozy I made up after checking out this pin on Pinterest - 10 Coffee Cozy Patterns.
I first made the Darth Vader patch and then made an all white patch the same size to cover the back. While I was creating the Darth Vader patch I was very cautious to always make sure that I pulled the yarn to the back side of the patch so that the front would be just stitches. The back, as shown above with the wool tied on, was not so neat so by stitching the white patch over the top it covered these threads nicely and also managed to hide my included real wool.
Then I got two coffee cups we had at home - my chai latte take away cup and our glass homestyle takeaway cup. I chained to the length that would work on both sized cups then did DC across the HDC around the edges to fatten it up. The DC area then worked as lots of little button holes.
Then I chained the length of the part that had the buttons attached and just did the rows of HDC to the fatness I wanted.
Both of these I kept relatively thin so he could use it on a mug if he wanted to and could put it through a mug handle.
I sewed these between the Darth and white patches then did SC the whole way around in the grey to stitch the two patches together and to link all the different elements with a border.
Then I stitched on two buttons I had in my random button drawer and anniversary present done!
I made it adjustable by including the two buttons and by making the button holes (DCs across the middle of the strap) all along so that the buttons can be done up wherever. Many of the Cup Cozy Patterns I saw the button only had the one hole or was just for decoration. I chose to make mine a bit more operational and adjustable for all different cups.
Below are photos of the two sized cups I used. Luckily the cups he gets are usually much taller than these.
He probably will only use it at home to be polite to me for a few times but it was more the thought and to continue our tradition of the gifts made of the different things.
I think I want to try to get into more of these graph crochet patterns and maybe try a C2C little rug.
I need to finish some other presents before starting a new project though.... otherwise we might not get any more wedding anniversaries. Ha! My Yarn stash and WIP bags are growing too much and threaten to overwhelm my laundry... and husband.
